Good morning BJP, now don’t go back to sleep

At last the Bharatiya Janata Party has stirred itself out of its tedious self-absorption to notice what is going on in the government. Not s...

At last the Bharatiya Janata Party has stirred itself out of its tedious self-absorption to notice what is going on in the government. Not sufficiently yet, but enough to observe that the Prime Minister should not be trotting off to the airport to bid farewell to a mere party president. Even if Sonia Gandhi is his boss, he needs to remember that he took an oath to serve the people of India, not the Congress Party. Something our External Affairs Minister needs to remember as well or does he now plan to accompany every party president who chooses to make a trip abroad?

Congress Party spokesmen, poor slaves, were ordered onto television to defend Madame and her minions. So what, they said, trying to brazen it out. So what if the Prime Minister went to the airport. He is a free man in a free country and does not have to be bound by protocol. And as for Natwar Singh behaving like Madame’s ADC, well so what again, besides being Foreign Minister was he not also a member of the Congress Party? As for Madame traveling to Moscow in a Reliance aeroplane so what again. Her security needs require her to avoid taking commercial flights and if the Congress Party pays for her private planes what is it to you and I.

It is a great deal to us, friends, a very great deal because here is our chance to demand that political parties publish their accounts. There is no point in a Right to Information law until we can use it to find out where our political parties get their money from and how much it costs to, for example, keep Sonia in private planes. We need to seize the moment because luckily we have a Finance Minister who is so determined to end black money that he taxes every Rs 10,000 we withdraw from our bank accounts. Spend one day in your party’s accounts department Mr Chidambaram and you might find more black money than you could dream of.

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Now that the BJP has discovered that it is supposed to be the main Opposition party, can we hope that when the Monsoon Session of Parliament begins it will urge the government to make a law forcing political parties to disclose the source of their funds and details of expenditure.

Can we also hope that it spends more time inside the House than it has done so far and get the government to explain what it is up to in general. Kashmir. Is there a policy? An objective? Who is in charge? And, which goof allowed Hurriyat leaders to be projected internationally as the true representatives of the Kashmiri people? By allowing them to travel to Pakistan and be lionised as heroes, we have played right into Pakistani hands and betrayed those brave Kashmiris who risked their lives to contest the Assembly elections. The Hurriyat, with all its posturing and preening, has so far not dared contest elections. Could it be because these so-called Kashmiri leaders know that they will be lucky to win more than their own seats in the Valley? Yet, thanks to the Pakistan government and the international media, they have managed to project themselves as the ‘‘true representatives’’ of Kashmir. Is this part of the Sonia-Manmohan government’s Kashmir policy?

Infrastructure. If the BJP starts behaving like a proper Opposition party, it will demand to know why there has been a visible slowing down in the building of highways so dear to their leader’s heart. It will also ask questions on why almost nothing has happened so far on the power front. Why our airports continue to look like decaying relics despite so much talk of improvement. Already there is chaos so what will happen when all these new private airlines get moving. We need to ask why the Railway Minister is using the Railways mainly to campaign in Bihar. Who is paying for the trains that take him to all those rallies?

There are other questions. Urgent questions of which the most important is who is running the government? The Prime Minister and his Cabinet or Sonia and her National Advisory Council? If it is the former then why is the Press Information Bureau issuing press releases on behalf of the National Advisory Council? Why does Sonia meet visiting Presidents and Prime Ministers as if she was directly in charge of foreign policy? If she has gone to Russia as a private citizen why is she discussing policy matters with Vladimir Putin?

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These are serious questions that have not been asked because the BJP has so far been a hopeless Opposition party. It spent its first six months out of power in a daze. How did this happen? How could this happen? These were the only questions it asked. It has spent the past six months walking out of Parliament and marching to Rashtrapati Bhawan over issues that have been political and not governmental. Politics affects political parties, government affects our future and will affect the results of the next general election.

Now that L K Advani has withstood the assault of his personal band of fanatics and now that it is clear he is not going to become Prime Minister any time soon, maybe he should go off on one of his yatras. He might discover that the things that matter to the average Indian are very different to the ones he has so far raised as Leader of the Opposition. Maybe he will discover that it was not too much economic reform that lost his party the last election but too little.

Write to tavleensinghexpressindia.com